John Hillric Bonn (1893-1985)
John Hillric Bonn III (1893-1985) was an American film editor and taxidermist. Memories about John Bonn: Amy Bonn wrote on January 27, 2017: "He worked for Paramount studios as a film editor. He worked with Rudolph Valentino when they were making the silent films. When Paramount decided to move to California, he said he wasn't going and moved to Sheffield, Massachusetts and he became a well known taxidermist." Biography: Movie Editor Turned Taxidermist. John H. Bonn spent 20 years as a Paramount Pictures production editor, his credits including the Rudolph Valentino movie "Cobra" (1925), in which the debonair actor played a destitute Italian nobleman who falls in love with a secretary (Nita Naldi). Paramount had a studio in Astoria, N.Y., in those days. That was Bonn’s day job, dealing with finer details of filmmaking. By evening, he stuffed and mounted fish, reptile, bird and the like. Unspecified circumstances prevented Bonn from traveling to Africa to participate in a film project -- surely a disappointment as he would have been able to collect interesting specimens from that continent. "He and Mrs. Bonn and their son came to the Berkshires instead, to live the quiet life for a year. The call of the ‘quiet life’ was so strong that now, six years later 1935, Mr. Bonn has no intention of leaving the tranquility," according to a local newspaper. Bonn, the son of Edward and Minnie Bonn, was born in Hudson, N.J. in 1893. He moved to New York City with his parents and lived there after he married Leontine, a native of Toulouse, France. Bonn learned the art of taxidermy and mounted his specimens -- upwards of 1,000 of them. If you add all his butterflies, double that number. "Some day this collection will be used in a town or city, I imagine," Bonn told Berkshire Courier reporter Ray Connors (March 5, 1935), "because it’s getting so large now that it’s unwieldy. I can’t find enough glass cases to house my pheasant specimens." Bonn’s collection ran the gamut from bison, Osborne and barren ground caribou, Alaskan moose, prong-horned antelope, and Rocky Mountain sheep and goats. "Every kind of rodent, from the smallest field-mole to a porcupine (which was news to us to learn that a porcupine is a rodent)," Connors wrote, "is in the private collection. All North American wild ducks are there, all birds of prey, including the most common and the scarcest, hawks, buzzards, and so on ..." Bonn at one time hunted his own specimens, but he gave it up. "The trend of the woods in which I am most interested," he told the Courier, "is in conservation of the wild life that we now have. This slaughter of animals is discouraging and I am much more interested in maintaining our present species than in exterminating them, either for food or for other reasons. Personally, I never hunt game, nor ever eat it. Many people find this attitude difficult to understand, particularly because I have so many birds and animals in this collection. I believe that game has a hard enough time of it without relaxing on the laws. I am a director of the Great Barrington Fish and game club, and one of my principal interests is in keeping animals in the woods -- not in taking them out." Bonn kept his mounted specimens in a room at his home on Sheffield Plain in Sheffield (near the old Pine Tree Inn). There were often visitors to his informal museum, as the Bonns were proprietors of Stanley Manor, a guest house and tea room. "The Boy Scouts come down here to take their tests in animal-life work;" Bonn said, "the high school biology classes have been down and are coming again, to see actually reproduced the types of animals they are studying. No, there’s no lock on the door, for anyone who cares to see the collection." "Most of Bonn’s current business is, of course, from sportsmen who bring him their fish, deer, woodchucks and foxes and beg him to mount them. In 1953, he filled over 100 such orders reluctantly because, since he is an artist, he devotes just as much meticulous care and painstaking skill to every job he undertakes, not only his own, and such an attitude does not make for production-line techniques," writer Peter Hill Mamet said in Modern Mechanix for August 1954. Bonn’s tools were scalpel, scissors, draw-knife, arsenical soap, borax, needle and thread, paper maché, wood wool and wire "and an infinite amount of skill and patience," Mamet said. He charged $30 to mount a deer head, $10 for a pheasant, $20 on up for a fish. Among his clients was Bartlett Hendricks at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, according to a Springfield Union story for Feb. 2, 1955. Hendricks urged the museum to obtain Bonn’s collection. Bonn died in Hartford, Conn., in 1985, having survived his wife by 19 years. Where did all the stuffed owls and mice end up? wondered James R. Miller of the Sheffield Historical Society, who provided the material for me to write this column. "The trustees would not come up with the money so Springfield Science Museum got it," answered Thom Smith, retired curator and aquarium director at the Berkshire Museum, "along with many Berkshire-found specimens that we gave John, a really likable fellow." (Source: Posted Friday, August 2, 2013 10:10 pm. By Bernard A. Drew, Special to The Eagle.)